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In a political environment in which racial and cultural stereotypes have been weaponized against our Haitian brothers and sisters, this movie hits a little different. However, it provides a good talking point about how Haiti is imagined in the US. Wes Craven's "The Serpent and the Rainbow," based on the book of the same name by "Wade Davis," hits on two of any of our worse fears, one, being buried alive, and two, losing control over our own bodies. Zombies have long been a metaphor for involuntary servitude, which had its worst expression in chattel slavery, so it is no wonder that Zombies are so closely associated with Haiti and its origins in the domination of the French plantation system over the lives of enslaved Africans. Voodoo is an African derived religion that can both liberate and/or captivate its adherents. It is paradoxically both a symbol of freedom in the Haitian revolution as well as of control from an outside force.

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Rust shows that he's wiling to sacrifice just about anything to get at Reggie Ledoux, including putting his life and the lives of others at great risk. Worth it?

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Watch out for Demons! Nobody knows what they'll do if they get ahold of you or your magical books made out of human skin and written in blood. Demons seem to enjoy racing through the woods in frantic POV tracking shots, and then smashing into Michigan State undergraduates on a wild-party vacation in rundown cabins in the utterly desolate Tennessee backwoods. Demons love to possess people and make them do stupid things with makeup, writing implements, and reel to reel tape recorders because they never seem to realize that if you just let folks alone, they'll debase themselves without any supernatural assistance. Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead" seemed to scratch an itch that emerged around the late 70s / early 80s horror community for extended, slapstick battles between humans and occult forces, and Ashley "Ash" Williams (Bruce Campbell) is the all time champ!

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Two types of freedom are on display in this Episode of True Detective, and they may be related. Is the sense of having a self an illusory torture better ended sooner rather than later? Is it the sense of having a self that causes us to fall into sin, or put another way, do we sin because we want to defend the self and acquire what it desires? What if there is no sin in the pursuit of the ultimate end, which is to end life, and thus end the illusion of the self? What is freedom if life is a "flat circle" destined to repeat itself time and again for all of eternity? If there was an escape from this bad infinity, and if there was, wouldn't whatever it takes to get free of it be justified? 

This episode is full of moral turpitude and some small gestures of forgiveness, full of the illusions of the false self, but is there actually a true self free of this fallen material world? Or is there nothing behind all of the masks?

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In the book of Revelations it is suggested that the Devil rules of the Earth, but only for a time. Revelations is about the overthrow of the rulership of Roman authorities, coded by its anti-Roman writer, John of Patmos, as "Babylon." The infamous number "666" refers specifically to the Roman Emperor Nero, who was a particularly ignominious figure to some early Christian communities, but the idea of Nero's return after his suicide to take back the emperorship comes from the Fifth Sibylline Oracle, which John of Patmos was riffing off in his vision of an evil ruler's return from the sea and subsequent, temporary, earthly reign. However, if Satan had read the apocalypse of John carefully, which one assumes he did, given that Satan is able to quote scriptures so well, Satan would have quickly realized that things don't end  great for him. It's difficult to understand why the Devil would be so keen on accelerating the end times since John of Patmos clearly indicates that the Devil gets his ass kicked. Maybe, the Antichrist thinks that the part of John's vision in which he comes from the sea and causes a bunch of mayhem was accurate, but that he could somehow escape the ass-kicking part by having a son who will some day become the president of the United States, as Damien aspires to do. Let's see if we can follow the logic of this 1976, Satanic classic.

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In as much as we are "thrown" into the circumstances of our existence, as Heidegger famously put it, we don't seem to have a lot of choice in the matter, or in the facticity of our determinate being. Yet, according to "Death of God" theologian Paul Tillich, it takes a certain amount of "courage to be." For Tillich this courage counts as freely chosen even though the rest of being has already been determined by the situation into which we have been thrown. Meaninglessness and death seem to follow more obviously from our unnatural awareness of the evil state of affairs in which conscious being finds itself. Rust Cole famously asserts along with Sophocles that, "It would have been better not to have been born." Nietzsche's famous counter argument is contained in his "Doctrine of the Eternal Return," which is read pessimistically in True Detective as the "Flat Circle." Nietzsche taught like Tillich that our freedom is found in the choice of whether or not to embrace the determinations of our given being or to passively fall into nihilism. For these thinkers being required an active, creative resist to meaningless, which is why "to-be" was an act of intense courage. Cole's "Antinatalism" holds that life is not good, and so the promise of the flat circle is the torture of an eternal return of what is essentially evil.

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Caution: In this episode we discussion both the physical and sexual violence of the movie.

The "Problem of Evil," which is the irresolvable contradiction between an all-loving, all-powerful God and the suffering of innocence, is what causes most of those who leave Christianity to leave it. Maybe a close second is the general disenchantment that came with the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment. William Peter Blatty took on both scientism and hopelessness in his novel and screen play of the Exorcist. Who is the Devil and why does he desire our despair? There are so many reasons to lose faith that it doesn't seem that there's much more for the Devil to do. If hope is the department of religion, then how do the religious keep it? Let's discuss.

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In True detective Season 1, Episode 1, Nic Pizzolatto, introduces his main themes and the sources of those ideas. The "Cosmic Horror" of HP Lovecraft is central, especially a troupe that Lovecraft borrowed from Robert Chamber's "The King in Yellow (1895)," in which a play containing forbidden knowledge drives any who makes it past the second act mad. The content of this maddening, esoteric information is never reveled to the readers of Cosmic Horror as a rule, presumably because it would drive them mad too, or possibly because it can't be put into words, but only gestured at, as Lovecraft often did with his bizarre concoctions of incomprehensible but weirdly thrilling analogies and mixed up metaphors containing multiple, usually unrelated animal, insect, elemental, and eidetic regions and portions, similes which hid as much as they revealed. Episode 1 is titled "The Long Bright Dark," which is a reference to the radiant or "supersaturated" darkness at the heart of both the alchemical "nigredo" and the beatific vision of Christian esotericism, particularly as articulated by the father of Christian Mysticism, Pseudo-Dionysuis, whose dark vision of Plotinus's "One" formed the paradox of twice negated nothingness that the Christian Mystic Meister Eckhart taught about when he preached that God revealed Himself by hiding more deeply in his infinite depths. The great apocalypse of Cosmic Horror is nothing, as is that of Christian mysticism, but the devil is in the details. Let's follow Pizzolatto's theology to see if it winds up in the ultimate meaninglessness of the absolute nil or in the mystical nothingingness of the love the grounds being unconditionally.

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How much of the Occult is there in the classic 1968 "The Devil Rides Out?" The film was directed by Terence Fisher and the screenplay, based on the Dennis Wheatley novel of the same name was written by Richard Matheson. The film depicts a secret coven of multi-ethnic practitioners of the dark arts, and one curiously knowledgable English aristocrat, the Duke de Richeau played by Christopher Lee, who is trying to thwart them. Occult practices have a long history going back at least 11,500 years to ancient Mesopotamia in the West, but modern esotericism involves a heady combination of Greek Magical papyri, mystery cults, Egyptology, Sumerian cuneiform, Hermes Trismegistus, numerology, holy symmetry, alchemy, Angelology, Demonology, mysticism and much more. Let's take a look at the movie that set the template for some of the Occult classics that followed in the late 60's and 70's.

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Alright! It's the season 2 wrapt up! We covered nature horror this season. The main theme of nature horror is Human Being's alienation from the natural world. Human Beings are biologically a part of nature but distanced from it by the our specialized uses of language, especially the uses of language that allow for symbolic behavior and for the hypothetical speculations of the subjunctive, which allow us access to the virtual probability spaces of the imaginal. This season we covered, The Birds, Jaws, Arachnophobia, Tremors, Gremlins, Anaconda, Deep Blue Sea, Lake Placid, Cabin Fever, The Descent, The Happening, The Ruins, Frozen, Outbreak, The Bay, Annihilation, Out of Darkness, and Grizzly Man. Each of these movies has its unique take on our precarious relation to the natural world from which we come. Come join us as we consider each of these works.

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What about when we choose to remain sick? There is a scene in Backrooms in which the protagonist "Clark," played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, decides to stay in his disease because coming out of it would mean taking responsibility for things that he doesn't feel responsible for, and what's more, giving up on the enjoyment of blaming others. There is an ambiguity about who or what is responsible where mental illness is concerned. Is environment, genetics, or something else to blame? Regardless, the conundrum is that often with mental disorders, nothing can change unless the sufferer takes responsibility for what he is not responsible for. Clark's therapist Mary, played by Renate Reinsve, realizes too late that she has gone in to Clark's psychosis too far to rescue him, and that she has put herself into great danger. Her mistake was her misunderstanding that she was crossing the line with a truly sick person not entirely to rescue him, but more because she still had an unresolved desire to save her now-dead, mentally ill mother.

Horror often deals with the psychological mazes that we trap ourself in. The terror is the built in ambiguity of these interior, dream-like spaces, which is the ambiguity of the monstrous other's connection to oneself. Good horror asks the question as to where the evil lays in such a way as to show how implicated in what we would prefer to see as the outside Other we are.

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Timothy Treadwell was mentally ill, and it led to his death and that of his girlfriend. He compensated for his sense of not being accepted in human society by projecting a persona of the protector of bears. He wasn't liked by the ladies but he believed that if they knew how good he was in the sack that they would have begged him for his company. And this sums up the lack of recognition that Treadwell projects onto the bears who would have loved nothing more than simply to be left alone to live theirs lives in the "simple enjoyment of being bears," as Herzog put it. How much should we hold someone responsible for his mental illness? There is something strange about asking someone to be responsible for something that he is not responsible for, but this seems to be the only way that anyone ever gets better from the determinate psychological conditions that often develop from a childhood that one did not chose. How responsible was Treadwell for the death of two bears, his girlfriend, and himself given the clearly psychotic state that directly lead to the tragedy depicted in Grizzly Man. And how much responsibility does a "documentarian" director like Herzog bear for said depiction, which was a depiction of a man's depiction of himself as a embattled hero, a sort of play acting that he was willing to die for?

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https://youtu.be/9lQHXQcW7_M

What is Otherness? Out of Darkness 2022 directed by Andrew Cumming fits into a number of horror categories, but we've decided to do it on our nature horror series. When we were kids back in the 80s, there were two bizarro movies about early hominids, Quest for Fire and the Clan of the Cave Bear. Both have proved to be quite incompatible with more recent paleo-anthropological findings. Many of those fallacies have been cleared up to great effect in Out of Darkness. The two most glaring of these mistakes were that Neanderthals weren't capable of the advanced symbolic behaviors of Homo Sapiens, and that there was no interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals because they were too genetically different to reproduce. Since that time, archeological evidence has shown that Neanderthals did participate in symbolic activities such as art, language, and religious practices, and genetic markers have proved that they did interbreed with Homo Sapiens. Out of Darkness is a story about human immigration and confrontation with the Other, and in true horror fashion, it asks who is the monster when otherness is encountered? As different as Neanderthals were, they were human.

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We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien presence in what seems to be a swamp somewhere on the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Maybe, it doesn't have one. Join us as we think about the human proclivity for self-destruction, the ambiguity of identity, and how the intentions of organic bodies arise from the non-intention of inorganic processes.

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In this special double feature addition of the Desire of Horror, Marty's sister Andrea joins the duo once again for a discussion of Outbreak (1995) directed by Wolfgang Peterson and The Bay (2012) directed by Barry Levinson. Char presents her wealth of horror movie references while Andrea brings her science background to this special episode. Andrea worked for a company that produced Covid test kits among other medical products during the height of the Covid pandemic. She reports that military escorts were sometimes necessary for transporting these materials as well as other extreme, security measures. As intense as the outbreaks in Outbreak and The Bay were, they were in some ways less intense than the Covid pandemic that they seemed to presage. Andrea gives a scientific analysis of these two movies that were retroactively considered harbingers of what was to come in 2020 from her background in contagious diseases. The main difference between fact and fiction seems to be the far greater fatality numbers of the Covid pandemic than fictional portrayals of pandemics had imagined. 

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Char and I cross over from our normally audio-only Desire of Horror Podcast to produce this Youtube video. We discuss the book Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix. https://youtu.be/XR8TvC5gfso The book provides a somewhat obvious but nonetheless useful capitalist critique around the concepts of the Professional Managerial Class or corporate speak; Consumer Culture, especially influencer advertisement techniques; and the toxic positivity of constant "self-maximization." An Ikea-like furniture store is built on the past site of a particularly ignominious prison, and the spirit of its warden and his prisoners emerge from within the vast, deliberately disorientating halls of the "Orsk" furniture store to haunt its circulating corridors, which are already haunted by the gaze of capital and consumption. The former prison was one of Jeremy Bentham's infamous "Panopticons." A Panopticon was a prison designed to require minimal guards because the prisoners always had the sense that they were being watched by the guards who were placed in a watch tower in the middle of the prison complex, so that they were able to see the maximal number of cells from their vantage point. The Panopticon serves as a fruitful metaphor throughout the novel as the horror of the ineluctable, internalized gaze of the Lacanian "Big Other," which for horror fans is something like the incubus always speaking from inside of the possessed's head.

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Three, vanilla, college kids get stuck in a ski lift chair high above some undisclosed, New England slopes, as a winter storm rolls in. While they're up there, they argue about stuff like their bizarre love triangle dynamic, which doesn't really help make being stuck in a ski lift chair for a long-ass time any more interesting since it's some typical teenager, third-wheel, after-school-special BS. The severe compound fracture that one of them gets trying to jump off the chair lift is gnarly but not that interesting either..., until that dude gets eaten by small "wolves" that are probably just regular dogs, which were, perhaps, a responsible fiscal decision given the movie's modest budget. This logistical practicality is a little bit interesting, but only a little, perhaps, because the affordable "wolves" were midsized dogs and kind of cute. 

Being mauled by standard-issue dogs that were painted to look like vicious wolves and shot with some sort of shadowy strobe effect from low angles to make them seem darker and bigger than average-sized, domesticated, well-lit dogs might be interesting, but the camera doesn't show it because we are told not to look at the mauling by the two remaining, vanilla, college kids stuck in a ski lift chair..., presumably because it would be too traumatic to see their best friend eaten alive by the one or two, well-trained but otherwise mediocre dogs that were actually on the set but shot to seem as if they were a wild and multitudinous pack of gigantic, drooling beasts. After the artfully obscured but budgetary, except for whatever was spent on the pricey-sounding, crunchy bone audio used throughout the movie, mauling that we are left to imagine from the two teenagers closed eyes and some random, half-eaten, special-effects department, body parts strewn around in the snow, there's some uninteresting but tense conversation around who was responsible for that dude jumping out of the chair and promptly getting mauled. Later there's some more uninteresting but tense dialog around not touching their frostbitten faces because their noses will fall off if they're not careful. Join us to find out if they're able to resist touching their frost-bitten faces and how the movies manages to add up to something sort of enjoyable to watch even though its not composed of many promising elements. 

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Privileged, White folk on vacation at a Central American resort may be a sort of cliche at this point, but The Ruins' version of this well-worn scenario takes some pretty fun, and perhaps, critical, twists, which seem to challenge the conventional take on this tale as old as the Club Med boom of the 70s and 80s. Tourist dollars have become a necessary evil for many a resort economy in the so called "Third-World," mostly located in the topical regions of the "Global South." The Ruins appears to be located somewhere in the Yucatan because there are Mayan ruins somewhat near by. North Americans feel lured to these "exotic" locations by the relatively cheap, all-inclusive, vacation packages, which are unequally beneficial to the local population depending on how one considers the influx of tourist dollars and the mostly menial job creation that is offered in return. Usually these packages include a few prefabricated excursions into the "strange" lands and ways of the native peoples. This culture-for-sale bargain only really works as long as the tourists remain within the confines of the protected resort even when they are outside of it viewing the local sites. Come find out what happens when a group of vacationers, mostly from around where I grew up on the "Northshore" of Chicago, lets their lust for "authentic" Mayan ruins, ruins well off the beaten path of the resort sanctioned forays, get the better of them.

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"The Happening" kind of sounds like there's about to be a groovy 1970's party. Maybe, that's intentional because what happens is like the total opposite of a groovy 1970's party, and M. Night Shyamalan loves the old switcheroo. Elliot Moore, played by Mark Wahlberg, doesn't solve problems like the Happening often, but when he does, he uses science. Perhaps, that's because he's a high school science teacher who loves his job, unlike any of my high school science teachers, and he wants the next generation to embrace the scientific lifestyle like he has, not like these science-skeptics that we've got nowadays. His best friend Julian, played by John Leguizamo, loves math. He calms himself and other people down by solving math riddles, but as it turns out, math riddles aren't much help against a mysterious plant-based neurotoxin that has the very unscientific property of being able to convince its targets to instantly, but artfully murder themselves. Julian and Elliot try their best to use reason to figure out the patterns of the happening with sophisticated probabilities, which makes for some very unentertaining, shouting-meaningless-statistics-back-and-forth scenes, but to no avail. As it happens, to survive the Happening, just like a groovy 1970's party, all you need is love; albeit, a very lack-luster, and unconvincing love between Julien and Alma Moore, played by Zooey Deschanel, but Deschanel was all the rage back in the mid-oughts, maybe you'll find remember about that enjoyable, and maybe you'll even fall back in love with her cutesy, quirky, spacey ways. I, unfortunately, did not. Come join us for yet another journey into the endless battle between humanity and plant-based neurotoxins that give you novel, theatrical ideas for self-annihilation.

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We're going down, way down into the underground with an all female cast of characters who desire nothing so much as to be put to the test of extreme situations. Yes, these adventurous ladies love their adrenaline, and oh, boy, are they going to get it. There are things in these uncharted caves that you wouldn't believe, unless you used to read The Sun and are familiar with its long running, hard-hitting "Batboy" series. Join us on yet another Appalachian adventure into weirdness. This time we don't run into any of the previous Appalachian troupes, like the questionable jokes of some of the other movies about extreme poverty and a general lack of education, but we really dive into the ultimate Appalachian stereotype of an isolated, inbred, and hostile native population. How will our intrepid Scottish adventures, trapped while spelunking in North Carolina, match up to these feral, humanoid creatures? How will they match up to each other and their own internal rivalries? Listen and find out.

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Welcome to a cast of reprehensible characters who aren't even lovable enough to hate. These guys not only have no moral compass but they've caught some highly contagious disease in the Appalachian region of North Carolina that causes their outward appearance to match their inner turpitude. However, there are still things to discuss about this debut of Eli Roth's signature body horror and callow, cheap dialog. He certainly loves to use offensive stereotypes for moronic laughs. But there seems to be something here about how we treat people who need our help, especially when whatever they have appears to be communicable. This is yet another example of pre-covid musing about the effects of a super spreader on our social relations. How will we act if the contagion causes our skin to peal, melt, and explode? And what if we're sexy college kids who just want to have sex and drink beer? Listen and find out!

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Well, let me tell you, this lake is anything but placid, especially since (spoiler alert) Mrs. Delores Bickerman (Betty White) keeps her big-ass crocodiles in there. And some poor man studying beavers with Brendan Gleeson gets his bottom half eaten off by one of them. Also, Brendan Gleeson's "Maine" accent mixes strangely with his Irish Brogue and winds up sounding sort of Southern. In a tragic turn of events, good-ole, local-boy Brendan has to take a break from comically eating his Twinkies (fat jokes find a way) to pull the beaver researcher out of the water, only to find that his legs are missing and his intestines are falling all over the place, which is, of course, one of the oldest gags in the book. That beaver-researcher guy paid the ultimate price for his love of beavers. But will crocodile-worshipper guy, Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt), trust-fund baby and professor of mythology, have to pay the ultimate price for his love of crocs? His religious beliefs center on swimming with and looking into the eyes of giant, dragon-like reptiles, and his parents have not only equipped him with a useless, advanced degree (one not too far from my own in religious studies), but they've also given him all the latest reptile-enthusiast gear, including a water landing helicopter, bright red, dive suit, and some electronic stuff that lights up and makes pinging noises. Bridget Fonda comes to join the party and contributes some spot-on, Paleontologist-up-from-New-York-City-to-see-if-they-might-be-dealing-with-a-dinosaur-in-the-middle-of-Maine lines, which win over the scuba-certified, fish and wildlife guy (Bill Pullman). Join us to hear about how their improbable love simmers and then catches fire as the lovers navigate both their budding love and the ragtag crew of lovable misfits trying to decide what to do about these big-ass crocodiles that are in the middle of Maine for some f-ing reason.

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One of the most common and ancient themes of horror is that of human transgression of the "natural" world. In Western Mythology this history of transgression begins with Prometheus's giving to humankind the ambiguous gift of fire, which introduced humanity's first alienation from the natural world as its preference for the "cooked" over the "raw," and for civilization over the wild. And this alienation has only increased over time as humanity has learned to separate itself from nature through "Pharmakon" (medicine) and "Techne" (technology). The transgressive nature of human progress is, perhaps, captured most famously when Eve partakes and then offers Adam the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. So, perhaps it is fitting that it is a Daughter of Eve (tongue in cheek), Dr. Susan Mcalester, played by Saffron Burrows who is both the initiator and the demise of the "Deep Blue" project. Deep Blue is a controversial genetic engineering effort to find a pharmacological technology for curing Alzheimer's by producing giant Mako sharks for their amazingly reparative brains, which may offer a biological solution to the horrible disease's infamous recalcitrance. But, nature does not like to be violated, especially when it is in the form of a Mako Shark. But, is curing Alzheimer's worth whatever consequences may follow? 

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Forget whatever you think you know about anacondas, you're about to get schooled. Anaconda starts out with some very brief but essential facts about the Amazonian native, like that anacondas enjoy regurgitating their prey in cat-like play with their food, which is the Chekov's Gun of anaconda facts for this raucous romp into the jungle. And it only gets crazier from there. Thank God that the movie provides us with John Voight's sleaze ball advice on everything from snake poaching to women. While it's almost unbearable to listen to his offensive "Spanish" accent, you'll love the 1980's video game snakes that Voight gets almost everybody killed trying to capture live. Voight's offensive "Spanish" accent and overly affected slime even turn fun-guy Owen Wilson insane with the weird promise of all the loot they'll get if Wilson will only help him to capture the hyperreal reptile. Come join us for a special time with those two goofballs, as well as J. Lo., Ice Cube, and the amazing hair of 1990's Eric Stoltz.

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Gremlins is a true Christmas classic. We had Marty's sister Andrea back for this very special Christmas addition of the Desire of Horror. Although there is much about the film that doesn't make sense, this nonsense makes it all the more madcap and raucous, which is enjoyable for some of the more demented among us. And Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without Phoebe Cates recounting the time that her idiot father died a gruesome death while trying to climb down the chimney with the family's Christmas booty. The message of this film may seem to have something to do with the grim reality of Christmas for those who are not the beneficiaries of Capitalism's bounties, or it may seem to be about the invasion of foreign products that reeked such havoc on American manufacturing, but probably its about how little Corey Feldman got excited about a grown man's comic book and knocked over some water onto an innocent Mogwai named "Gizmo," which started a plague of highly intelligent Gremlins that nearly destroyed Kingston Falls, and gave Phoebe Cates one more reason to hate Christmas.

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The concept is sharks under the ground, which is extra terrifying because you can't get away from them by staying out of the water at Amity Island Beach. And these "Graboids," as they are so aptly named, terrorize the small town of "Perfection Nevada" in grand fashion from "The Deep" below its inhabitants' feet. Apparently, Kevin Bacon was at one time embarrassed about his role in this horror-comedy, but now that it has become a "cult classic," he's thinks fondly of this fun little flick. Not everything has to be so serious, Kevin Bacon, but these "dirt dragons," clearly based on the "Sandworms," or Shai-Hulud, if you prefer, of Frank Herbert's Dune novels, are nothing to trifle with. It takes a geologist (Finn Carter), two obscurely employed, possibly handy men (Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward), some doomsday preppers (Michael Gross and Reba McEntire), and a whole cast of other quirky folks to rid the Nevada Desert of these menaces.

And we welcome a Tremors expert since an inappropriately young age, my sister Andrea, onto this podcast to frame its finer points, provide some unbelievable behind the scenes insights, and yuck it up with us two fools.

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With so much about immigration in the news as of late, it is hard not to see Arachnophobia  as not somehow in dialog with the issue of middle America's obsession with being taken over by foreign invaders. Its release date was 1990, and immigration as well as relate concerns about the racial make up of America were certainly issues then as they are now, especially for bigots who remain a substantial portion of the American population. A particularly vicious breed of spider is accidentally taken from the Venezuelan Amazon back to an idealized, small town USA. It breeds with the white bread spiders of Canaima, perhaps a reference to Canaan, or maybe Cain himself, and produces a murderous breed of poisonous spiders that threaten to ruin the Heartland along with its traditional, country values. But don't worry (spoiler alert) the big city doctor, played by Jeff Daniels, recovers his manhood, overcomes his fear of spiders, and saves the "average" American's idea of how things used to, and therefore always should, be. And then for the sake of fully returning the townsfolk back to their Eden and he to his, the good doctor moves his urban family back to the big city where there are more "native," natural disasters, such as San Franciscan earth quakes. The good, country folk are finally left in peace of their nostalgia. 

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The desire of the unknowable other takes on new depths in the impenetrable, black eyes of a shark. Matt Hooper, the marine biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss, waxes poetic about the almost eternal perfection of the shark's form, which was designed by evolution for the singular purpose of hunting. But there is a sort of ambiguous place for the shark at the top of the of sea's food chain since the more recent arrival of an even more effective and vicious apex predatory in the form of the human intention. A shark's blank eyes may give no indication of its intentions, but at least they can be inferred from their actions. The human intention is belied by their eyes' deceptive transparency. Even when the human speaks its desire, it remains hidden. Human intention is unknowable both in relation to each other and to themselves. Hidden behind the thin veneer of the Freudian Unconscious, human intention lies in internal contradiction to itself. 

Quint, played by Robert Shaw, is insane with his desire to confront the shark. Like Ahab's desire for the White Whale, it is a hidden intention that emerges as a reckless madness that puts the other crew in danger. But the specific contours of his obsession begin to emerge one evening out at sea when Quint recalls in nightmarish details his experience of being torpedoed while aboard the USS Indianapolis after delivering the Atomic Bombs during World War II. The sharks that attacked and killed most of the crew seem to represent the mystery at the heart of the blank violence of the war and especially of those incomprehensible blasts delivered to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider, also must face his own demons presented as a phobia of water but which seem to express his feelings of impotence about the incomprehensible crime of 1970's New York City, which he left to live a simpler, more intentional, island life in the vacation town of Amity. But as Freud taught, whatever is repressed returns with a vengeance until it is faced head on.

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We're starting the new season off with the genre-defining classic of nature horror, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. This movie may be about the random, inexplicable, violent behavior of birds, but it is also about the random, inexplicable, violent behavior of people as well, especially when they they're in love. Hitchcock can't let one of his film's go without a needy, overbearing mother; nor a manic, child-like woman who needs a man to take care of her; nor a self-absorbed man unworthy of any woman's devotion. No less than four women (his mother, his sister, and two lovers) vie for the love and attention of the dispassionate Mitch, but Mitch's mother will aways win because he refuses to protect any of those interested in him from the judgement of his mother. Join us for a movie full of bizarre love triangles and a bird's eye view of human relations under the pressures of love.

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Here we go with the vampire wrap up! It's been a bloody first season at the Desire of Horror podcast, and that's how we like it! Blood has always had a central place in the History of Religions. Almost every form of sacrifice, pact, and praise has involved either literal or figurative blood as the primary representative of the mysterious life force that courses through our veins but somehow doesn't seem to belong to us. Its mysterious doings are beyond us because blood, like life, is something that is given without our asking for it, and its many necessary life operations are performed mostly in the darkness outside of our conscious awareness. And when it flows are lost, often by similarly unmanageable circumstances, life is irrevocably lost as well. The vampire's dependence on blood for its strange form of life, if what is undead is in any sense "living," renders the vampire a total dependent on it, which often puts it in situations in which it must face its own impotents. Whatever sinister pact had to be entered into to obtain eternity, the vampire inevitably ends up on the losing end because the conditions for the continuation of un-death are an endless yearning for whatever it is that is in the blood that can't be gotten from it by the ritual transfusion of blood that vampires must perform to feed. They may get to be apex predators wielding uncanny power, but this strength is tempered by the misery of its many limits, not the least of which are extreme loneliness and ennui. Join us as we discuss how these advantages and their limitations are played out in each of the films that we viewed this season.

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We are in heaven with this little slice of hell. Charla loves the "pure evil" of the criminally insane. And I love the interior design and clothing choices of the late 1970's. But why does Michael Myers do it? He doesn't ever seem to be satisfied after he murders someone. His Death Drive is an endless repetition of the same. What do psychopaths want out of life? His psychiatrist Dr. Loomis diagnosis him with his professional proclamation that he is "Pure evil!", but what does pure evil want? John Carpenter gives Michael an Oedipal backstory of discovering his sister having sex, but this explanation hardly seems plausible given that he not only murders his sister but becomes a supernatural predator bent on stabbing to death as many sexual active teens as he can get his hands on. When we don't know what the Other's desire is, we are terrified by the endlessness of its possibilities. Speculating about the psychology of psychopaths has been a pastime of our society for sometime now. We are fascinated with them because we wonder about our connection to them. Do we also have immoral and immortal desires?

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We had the great pleasure of welcoming Charla's daughter Michelle on this one.  She brought a lot of great insights into this instant classic. Music is a hellava drug. In the last film Queen of the Damned it woke up the first vampire from back in the days of Mesopotamian Uruk. And in this one it wakes up all kinds of stuff both good and bad. The music industry has been known to have vampiric relations with artists, especially Black musicians. The story of Black music in America is rich and complex and full of both appropriation and exploitation. The blues especially has had a fascinating journey from the Mississippi Delta to the Northern cities of the Great Black Migration. The originators such as Buddy Guy, whose life story is loosely depicted in the movie, brought it from the Southern Black Church to the Northern Bar and club scene frequented by a mostly White cliental. But Smoke and Stack who are twins, both played by Micheal B. Jordan, are bringing it back along with many unintended consequences to a blessed, but mostly cursed, Southern juke joint for a one night extravaganza like no one has every seen.

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This Vampire's origins go all the way back in the Ancient Mesopotamia City of Uruk. And Akasha (Aaliyah) like Lestat (Stuart Townsend) loves music. Lestat had decided the world was too boring to live in any longer, so he laid in a tomb to see if he could die. But then in the late 90's Nu Metal broke through the walls of his sarcophagus and into his heart, and he thought that the world had become cool again. He immediately formed a Nu Metal band of his own. A band so devastatingly good that he woke up Akasha, who had been frozen in her own grave-like state for five or so millennia. She couldn't resist making him her Nu Metal king. Come join us for a wild ride with The Queen of the Damned.

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What is more real than real? Why it's the "Hyper-Real" of the cinema. Jean Baudrillard formulated his theory of the Hyper-Real, which is actually the death of "the Real" by simulacrum, in part from a quote from Clockwork Orange, in which the protagonist Alex reflects on how the blood in the screen is better than real blood because its "redder than red," or realer than real in Baudrillard's way of thinking about similacrum. And the contradiction of real, cinematic blood is a useful way to think about Shadow of the Vampire's approach to the Real. The Hollywood phenomenon of a director willing to sacrifice his female lead to get the "real-est" possible performance out of her is taken to an extreme by director FW Murnau, played by John Malkovich. Murnau is even willing to sacrifice the life of his leading lady Greta Schroder, played by Cathrine McCormick, in a pact that he makes with a real vampire Max Schreck, or possibly Nosferatu himself, played by Willem Defoe, to get the most realistic possible performances out of his cast. Shadow of the Vampire plays with the ideal of a performance so real that it crosses the line into the impossible ambiguity of the Hyper-Real. Come join us as we try to discern when extreme authenticity becomes a lie.

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Are these f**king things vampires or infected? Around this time in the early aughts there was a slue of horror movies that straddled the line with science fiction because the monsters no longer had supernatural origins but virological ones. 28 Days Later comes to mind because it featured a zombie apocalypse without any paranormal activity. Vampires have always been liminal creatures, having emerged at the end of the late Middle Ages and the beginning of the Enlightenment. The witch trails were over in Europe when vampires emerged from their graves in the Balkans as undead, hybrid figures somewhere between medical subjects and the occult, which provided enlighten, Protestant, Western Europeans yet another opportunity to gawk at the "primitive" Eastern European proclivities for superstition and Catholicism. But the Van Helsing of I Am Legend, aptly played by the legendary face slapper Will Smith, is no longer versed in the dark arts, but is a modern man of science, working to find the cure for the retrovirus that inadvertently infected the population of New York with a disease that cause its victims to turn pale white, hate the sun, and become considerably less articulate than Bram Stoker's Count Dracula.

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In the small oil town of Barrow in the northern-most region of Alaska there are thirty days of night in the middle of winter. Sounds like a vampire's dream vacation. All the cellphones have mysteriously gone missing, all the dogs have been mercilessly murdered, and someone has destroyed the radio antenna. With no flights in or out for thirty days, it would seem that the residents of Barrow are like fish in a barrel for hungry vampires. And what's even worse is that these vampires are straight nihilists. Is there any hope to be found amidst the godless? Listen and find out.

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Both the 1931 Bela Lugosi version of Dracula and the 1970 Christoper Lee version claim to be sticking to Bram Stoker's original vision. When most of us think of Dracula, we either think of Lugosi or Lee, or their images switch back and forth in our minds. Join us as we discuss how each of them approached Stoker's Transylvanian aristocrat. Stoker's Dracula was an alchemist ubermensch of sorts, who through the dark arts and his undying will managed to unlock the secrets of eternal life, but it was a Faustian bargain in which he became the thrall of his own avarice and need for human blood. The sciences of the late enlightenment also seemed to promise to unlock the vital secrets of mortality. The symbol of the blood transfusion became the centerpiece of Stoker's version as well as all of those adaptions that claim to take Stoker's themes seriously.

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A late 70s miniseries has many features to recommend it. They are normally full of odd bowl haircuts, unnecessarily long establishing shots, and sweat, but this one also includes multiple commercial-break, freeze-frame cuts, long, meaningful stares, and a battle between two mages in a tight 1970's kitchen! Come join us for Tobe Hooper's adaptation of the Stephen King classic "Salem's Lot." The desire of this vampire is to turn a whole town evil. But the house from which he chooses to launch his bid, already has a dastardly history. Let's explore.

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This was a difficult but rewarding episode to do. Some less brave, or possible less foolhardy, commentators might've stayed away from the Swedish, modern-day classic Let the Right One In and its American remake, Let Me In, because of the complexity of the topics it raises, especially around Queer and Trans matters, but we dove right in. Join us as we ask the question of the desire of the Trans Vampire. Perhaps, Vampires are by nature Queer and Trans figures? Let's discuss.

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One of Charla's top five of all time! We got to lighten up and have a little fun on this one. It's got the two Coreys, a town split between punks and deadbeat hippies, and lots of pastel shirts with shoulder pads! Come and reminisce the 80's with us while we discuss what the Lost Boys desire besides never growing up.

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One of my favorites of all time! Coppola's over the top extravagance at its best. Charla likes it okay. Join us as we discuss Coppola's lush depiction of vampiric desire.

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Louis doesn't know how to be a vampire, so he goes to Paris to find out. What can we learn about the desire of the vampire from Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire? Anne Rice portrayed the difficulty of being a vampire as the all too familiar dilemma of human desire, whether mortal or undead, nobody seems to know what to do with themselves. Join Charla and Marty as they dive even deeper into vampires.

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Nosferatu 1922 originally came into being because Bram Stoker wouldn't come off the rights to Dracula. Dracula's aristocratic suavity was transmuted into Count Orlok's impish vulgarity to avoid a lawsuit. But the desire of both were for the blood of the living. When Orlok recently returned in 2024's, he appeared as the transmuted, self-consuming desire of a fourteen year old girl. What could this guy possibly want? Charla and Marty will figure it out together.

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